DAMON: That's I think the fourth or fifth movie George and I have done together.

CLOONEY: And we've always wanted to be a puppet, so I must say that I would have been offended if I wasn't in it. I was thrilled. Don, you were upset that you weren't in it? But those guys are friends of mine. I helped them get their show on the air and was Sparky the gay dog and was in their movie. So part of the fun about being up here is that we get to be objects in that as well. So it's fine.

DAMON: Neither of us take ourselves too seriously. Plus, if you're friends with people who are comedians, you can always count on a comedian to throw you under a bus for a laugh whenever they can. It's what they do.

CLOONEY: Oh, it's a project that we were going to do as a live project for CBS about a year ago and CBS decided not to do it. But it's been a passion of mine for a long time. Growing up around broadcast journalism my whole life sort of dictated whether we were living in a nice house or not, sort of the ups and downs of broadcast journalism. And also talking about using fear to attack civil liberties and writs of habeas corpus and things like that. To me, it's an interesting time to constantly talk about things that can be cyclical. But it's not a political film. Actually, we're doing the story of Edward R. Murrow taking on, these four broadcasts where he took on McCarthy and McCarthy did the rebuttal. And it's based on that So we'll do it. I'll mess it up. I'll screw it up somehow.

Q: George, you had to gain weight for an upcoming role. Were you treated differently?

CLOONEY: Yes, I did, thank you. And I'm 50. (Laughs)

DAMON: Well, it's not like when Gwyneth Paltrow put on the fat suit and nobody could recognize her. He looked like George. He just looked really heavy and like 50.

CLOONEY: These are my friends. Imagine the people who aren't my friends, what they'd do. No, listen, it's a good thing. I wouldn't do it again. I'll do it once. I'm in the process of trying to lose a lot of that weight. It's hard on your system. It was interesting too. You were certainly less recognizable and that made it sort of interesting, but we were in some places you didn't really want to go out anyway. [We were] over in the Middle East so Matt and I stayed in our hotel rooms a lot.

Cheadle even pulls off pink

DAMON: Eating.

CLOONEY: Eating and eating and eating.

DAMON: I put on 20 pounds for no reason. It was not a character choice, just an accident.

DAMON: If you saw Traffic, it's written by Steve Gaghan, who wrote Traffic. And Gaghan is directing. George and Steven Soderbergh are producing it. Structurally, it's really similar to Traffic in that it's four or five different storylines converging around one topic, but in this case the topic is oil instead of drugs. So it's structurally similar to Traffic and it's a big directing job for Steve Gaghan

CLOONEY: Yeah, it's going great and Jeffrey Wright's in it. It's a great cast and it's about corruption. It deals with oil in some of the same ways that Traffic dealt with the war on drugs. So if we don't screw it up, it's a really interesting premise and a really interesting movie. We'll see. We've got our fingers crossed.